changed at the intersection of Forty-
fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, a
large truck, racing to beat the red,
knocked her down. Its front tire
crushed her right foot. Its rear tire
rolled over her left side and snapped
her femur, broke her pelvis, and left her
with extensive internal injuries. An
ambulance rushed her to Bellevue
Hospitafs trauma center, where a doc-
tor said that if the rear wheel had struck
her thigh just two inches higher shè d
have been killed. Surgeons adminis-
tered blood transfusions, inserted a ti-
tanium rod in her leg, and told her that
she needed to spend six weeks in bed.
Many months of painkillers, excruciat-
ing rehab, and physical therapy fol-
lowed, as she progressed from wheel-
chair to crutches to cane. Her oldest
friend, Jim Lax, who is now a physi-
cian, said that she experienced a kind
of "post-traumatic stress," including
bouts of anxiety and depression.
The columnist and former food
critic Frank Bruni remembers going
out to dinner with her after the acci-
dent, with Bill Keller and his wife,
Emma. 'We were celebrating that she
was out of a wheelchair," Bruni says,
and at the end of dinner Abramson
said that she wanted to walk home. "I
remember it took us twenty-five min-
" B . " I 1
utes, runt says. twas e even at
night. It was the end of a very long day.
But she had an opportunity to get in a
little therapy and exercise, and I re-
member thinking, She is one fierce, re-
silient woman."
Abramson returned to work, in a
wheelchair, nine weeks after the acci-
dent. By then, the Times had moved
from its old building, on West Forty-
third Street, to the sleek Renzo Piano
building, on Eighth Avenue between
West Fortieth and West Forty-first
Streets. The architect had made each
editor's office the same size, with the
same furniture and gray industrial car-
pet. All her old furniture was gone. "It
11 " h " I
was tota y not me, s e says. went to
Arthur and I said, 'It would make a
difference for me if I could have myoId
stuffback.' He laughed, but he was not
going to deny me in my state."
Her old furniture came back: a
cloth-covered green couch with a dog
pillow, a Persian rug that would cover
part of the carpet, a shelf of books, a
50 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2011
Yankees baseball cap, and pictures of
Babe Ruth, Keith Richards, and E. B.
White and his Westie.
D uring Abramson's tenure as manag-
ing editor, many women at the
Times came to see her as their advocate.
When women received promotions,
Abramson often hosted a celebratory
party for them. These events got to be so
frequent, the European correspondent
Suzanne Daley joked, "it almost became
'Oh, God, another party!' I credit her
with being the first woman to hit that
level and actually bring other people
along." But the support that Abramson
provides for women makes some men at
the Times nervous. One male correspon-
dent says, "She plays favorites, it is said.
Especially for women."
Some also complained that, as man-
aging editor, Abramson was too close to
Sulzberger andJanet Robinson. In inter-
views, she would go out of her way to
praise them. William E. Schmidt, the
deputy managing editor, puts it a
different way. He says of Abramson,
"Shè s shrewd in that she understands the
importance of dealing with people up-
stairs. Many previous editors treated up-
stairs as the place that delivered the
money the newsroom needed." But in the
current tough economic times, he says,
Abramson understands that "you need
these people."
As for the complaint that Abramson
is too rough with underlings, some be-
lieve that female executives like her are
victimized by stereotypes. Sally Singer,
who worked closely with Anna Wintour,
at Vogue, before joining the Times as the
editor of its magazine T, last year, told
me, "When women are blunt, maybe it's
seen as 'tough,' but actually it's just
efficient. I worked for Anna for eleven
years, and you can hem and haw and pre-
tend to like something, but why? You're
just going to end up having six more
meetings about it-and you're going to
demoralize someone over days as op-
posed to in a moment."
Thirteen years ago, Abramson and
Griggs bought an eighteenth-century
house near Long Island Sound in Madi-
son, Connecticut, where Scout, their
golden retriever, frolics in the water and
they can take long walks. In 2009,
Abramson began writing a popular on-
line column for the Times about her dog,
and she is now publishing a book, "The
Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named
Scout." Like all books that people write
about their dogs, it's partly about the pet
and partly about the owner. In it, she de-
scribes the death of the family's first dog,
Buddy, and says that her sister calls Scout
" d ." h B dd " B
nee ter t an u y. ut we were
needy, too," she writes. "Mter the depar-
ture of our children, Buddy's death, and
my accident, our home lives had become
a little narrow and thin. . . . Bringing into
our empty nest another living being to
make happy and take care of helped put
our relationship back on its natural axis."
"She knew before she did the puppy
diaries that she would get a lot of grief:"
Trish Hall, the deputy editorial-page ed-
itor who edited the column, says. "She
didn't care. I like it that shès got this rich
life. It used to be that women wouldn't
talk about when their kid had a dentist
appointment. Jill doesn't pretend that
work is the only thing in her life."
"Being executive editor is a full-time
job," one masthead editor demurs. ''You
shouldn't be writing a book." Especially
one called "The Puppy Diaries." Abram-
son admits that she is self-conscious
about her dog book being published dur-
ing her second month as executive editor
of the august New York Times. Say what
you will about the grayer days of the
Times in mid-century, but it was always
hard to imagine James Reston writing a
book about a beloved household pet.
I n the spring of 2010, in an effort to
brighten the paper's future (and, pre-
sumably, her own), Abramson took a
leave from the managing-editor posi-
tion to supervise news content on the
Times Web site. She spent much of her
time in a section of the third floor near
the Web team. Her "detour" coincided
with a company-wide reëvaluation of
how the Times should charge for its on-
line edition.
Abramson was surprised at how
poorly integrated the two parts of the
newsroom were. The daily meetings de-
voted to selecting six front-page stories
consumed huge amounts of energy; little
time was spent thinking about what ap-
peared on the Web home page.
Some people in the newsroom believe
that Abramson's digital knowledge re-
mains skimpy. But, broadly speaking, she
knows that the Web is vital to the Times